News

Welcome once again to our weekly news. We hope that you are enjoying our recent release at the end of last week. The build has been very well received. As well as making a large number of tweaks and fixes which solve issues raised by our community and beta testing team, we’ve added some extremely powerful Sprite commands that open up a lot of development doors. It’s time to start thinking about those lock-picking sub games and a host of other features.

This week we’re taking another look at our amazing community and there is a lot of really nice work-in-progress out there.

First off this week is this excellent and atmospheric screenshot from forum user Shivers. It’s great to see more and more genres making the way into the world of GameGuru.

Wild West Town by Shivers

Another great change of pace is this tribute from the talented and inventive Synchromesh,

This wonderful looking and atmospheric piece really showcases what can be done with just a little work. We hope to see more from him again soon. You’ll also spot the new radar feature in the video above and you can find details of how you can use this in your own games later in this news update.

This next one from M2Design is a little more traditional but shows great promise. Blight Island’s plot is still unannounced, but we were instantly reminded of a certain other game, not a ‘Far Cry’ away.

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If you like what you see in this video, you should also check out the designers store media. He has an excellent range of buildings and other assets at great prices.

From the Steam boards, user and forum support team member Myke P showcases another excellent screenshot from his continued mission to impress us all.

In other news, let’s take a quick look at what’s in the latest GameGuru build. If you’ve not already grabbed yourself the last Friday’s release you should update now for some excellent additions. We’ve added so much that we’ll only list a few here, but there are some great and much-requested features.

Added new EDITORS\KEYMAP folder with ability to remap any key used by GameGuru

Speeded up entity zoom in mode

PAGE UP and PAGE DOWN now respects the size of the selected entity when in snap mode

Fixed a slowdown in the IDE when not selecting an object or scrolling with WASD or arrow keys

Character Creator now reports head limbs being shot and has been added to light ray render

Fixed an issue where an entity would turn to wireframe when still above the ground

Fixed an issue with SKYSPEC file settings

Fixed an issue where the property panel would stay open if a video was selected whilst in properties

Fixed a problem with resetting weapons

Fixed an issue with using the widget and R key to rotate

New Gem World game added

Media from Gem World added to the Cartoon category for you to use.

Shoot an enemy in the head and you’ll take down the opponent in one shot, yes we’ve added headshots to this build.

Added back spot flashes for player and enemies shooting.

The scripting commands have been expanded significantly so you can take final control in many areas of the engine.

That’s it from us for another week, Christmas is rapidly approaching and we are expecting to be coding up to the last minute. There will be one more news update before then, so keep an eye out next Monday for more exciting GameGuru information.

Hello once again to the GameGuru news update. We’ve been very busy behind the scenes this week with a major focus on fine tuning GameGuru as well as adding some cool new features. More of that later, but for this week we take another look back at some of the amazing media that our talented artists have uploaded to the store over the last year.

First off, we’d like to remind you of this excellent value skybox packs from popular and talented artist Noktavian

Also, this week, let’s take a look at a couple of the amazing critters from artist Dagored.

This giant spider is a must-have, whether you’re creating horror, post-apocalyptic or fantasy games, this is ideal.

On a similar theme and also from Dagored is this excellent giant crab. We’re sure you can think of many uses for such a beastie!

If you’re looking for industrial models this amazing Chemical Plant pack from prolific artist Lafette is a great place to start.

On the subject of industry, this Terra Forming Plant from Wolf crosses a number of genres and will make a great addition to anyone’s media collection.

Lastly on our list for our look back is this great media pack of World War 2 vehicles from BSP. Excellent for period games or even for an in-game museum!

What’s new in GameGuru!

The last week has been all about fine tuning GameGuru and adding in a few nice features so you can expand your game making horizons. Using the new sprite system, GameGuru developer Ravey took a little time out in last week’s Twitch session to show how it’s possible to add a Radar HUD to your games. You can see it in the screenshot above, this really shows the power of the new Lua sprite commands and adds a little extra professionalism to your levels. In the next release you’ll get access to this radar and you can easily change it to your own graphic style.

In addition to this, Lee has made some nice changes to the baked light system and the team have added a lot of requested Lua commands to the existing scripting options, adding yet more power for you to create a unique look and add more gameplay. We’re hoping to release the public build later this week at which point we’ll detail all the new toys!

Lastly, as you all know, we’re a community-led development so don’t forget that it’s never too late to vote and you can register a new vote or change an old one here if you want your say in the direction GameGuru heads.

Hello again, and welcome to the GameGuru weekly news. We’ve had a great development week with some fun and surprising little additions that we know will add a huge amount of power to GameGuru. Before we move onto looking at what’s new in GameGuru, we’re once again going to take a look at the work of our talented community.

We love this screenshot from Sergay Cherevin, this member’s work has constantly stood out and we’re always looking out for updates to this project. Well done Sergay, keep up the great work and keep posting updates into the Gallery.

Another great screenshot from Spudnik really caught our eye, this model of Stonehenge not only makes excellent eye-candy but is also available as a free download here. So, why not head over to the forums and grab the model. Don’t forget to thank Spudnik for his kind donation, then build your own Stonehenge in your game levels ready for the spring equinox!

Although we’ve recently featured the work of artist OldPMan, this new screenshot from him serves are a good reminder of this great selection of sci-fi media available in our store. You can either purchase these models individually or as part of a pack which includes all of his work.

This work called Death Valley by Steam user BOOTsyhas a very atmospheric feel and showcases a great use of just a few models from our DLC Mega Pack 1 available on Steam.

This WIP from developer Ertlov looks excellent and as far as we are aware is the first planned commercial game nearing completion. Ertlov and is team are planning to release Father’s Island in December 2015, so keep an eye out for this game coming your way soon.

Lastly this week, we were very impressed with this entertaining little side project from community member Emrys. Not daunted by the huge budget of Fallout 4, he’s attempting his own version and we’ve got to say the first results are excellent. As you can see he still has some textures to add, but this is one that we’ll be following very closely indeed and you can keep up to date with his latest additions here.

BETA V1.1b1

We released Beta V1.1b1 to our testers over the weekend and so far, feedback has been very positive. We’ll be reviewing all of it this week and fixing any major issues, we then hope to bring all of the latest great additions to our general users as soon as possible.

If you’ve been keeping up with Lee’s blog you may already have seen the teasers and sneak peeks he let slip, but while it’s still early days for a lot of new features, you can all look forward to the much-requested return of head shots (instant kills with shots to the head!). Never one to leave it at that, Lee has upgraded the system to allow developers to select not just the characters head, but any named limb, so if you wanted to create a system for registering limb hits (for example a weak spot on an enemy) the system now reports these and action can be taken based on them. This opens many other design ideas, characters shot in the leg could now be animated to flinch or even limp afterwards, specific parts of an object can be targetted and much more.

Another powerful feature you can all look forward to is the new Sprite system that we’ve added to LUA. You can now place multiple sprites, assign images to them, place them anywhere on the screen, (you can even reposition them using Lua scripting), rotate, scale and alter the depth of them. In essence, you can now create 2D mini-games, add your own fully interactive GUI system or something more imaginative, (Lockpicking and keypads spring to mind).

As you can see from the image above, we’ve also listened to user feedback and made some changes to the metrics panels. Users can now minimise or drag the panels around for a look that better suits their development needs. This will free up the display and let you better see the results of the changes you make.

We’ve also taken the opportunity to add a wealth of new cartoon media, provided to us by the talented store artist Unfamilla. This update includes a lot of the artists media previous available on the GameGuru store as well as some new, previously unseen models.

As well as these major updates, we’ve also revisited the lightmapping system and updated the quality by allowing the developer to define their own lightmap size from 512 x 512 to 4096 x 4096. Add to this a gambit of tweaks and fixes to improve the engine as a whole, we’re sure we’re heading to another great release.

That’s it for this week. We’ll be hard at work once again in the coding corner so it’s goodbye from us for now. As always, thanks for your amazing support and we hope you’re enjoying the direction GameGuru is taking as much as we’re enjoying developing the engine.

As you’ll all be aware, the long awaited GameGuru v1.1 performance build arrived last week and launched under the Software section in Steam. We moved it because of community feedback requesting it be moved from Games to Software.

In general V1.1 has had a great reception with some excellent performance improvements being seen by virtually everyone. There have been a couple of small teething problems, but nothing major and we’ll be fixing those over the next few weeks and bringing you some other features before the holiday season. All in all, we’re very happy with the way the release went and we are confident that we’ll soon be able to build on this success with some your important community voted for features.

We’re currently reviewing the voting board and we will start prioritising each request based on popularity and speed of implementation. This may mean a few of the smaller, lower-rated features get implemented alongside some of the more popular ones if they will only take an hour or so, but rest assured, we are in this for the long haul and we intend to keep going until users have all the great tools they need to create games quickly and easily.

Don’t forget that it’s never too late to vote and you can register a new vote or change an old one here.

Now that the majority of users are seeing leaps forward in performance it’s time this week to showcase assets from the ever expanding GameGuru Store. We’ve had a lot of interesting uploads in the last couple of weeks covering many genres, so let’s take a look at what’s new as well as a some of the store’s golden oldies.

First off this week is a new set of terrace houses from KenCharlesLong ideally suited to complement his Alley pack. These packs reflect the United Kingdom perfectly, and are suitable for almost any genre set from the 1920’s onward, these packs are a must have for any user interested in creating modern day games. In the screenshot above you can see a mix of media from this new pack, Mega Pack 3, Ken’s road sign pack and some default media.

If you are looking for something sci-fi based, we recommend that you check out this new space station construction media from OldPMan. The media is only available individually at present and is well worth a look. Click on the image above to watch a video of the pack in action.

Gtox has combined all of his excellent critters into one pack, providing 46 amazing value creatures from dinosaurs and fish through snakes to evil plants. Click on the image above to see the whole content.

Popular store Artist BSP has recently released this mini pack of 5 good quality buildings, ideal for adding realistic backgrounds and streets to your town and city level creations.

The last pack we’re looking at this week is this amazingly detailed and varied pack from Lafette. The simply named Buildings and Props pack describes the content well. Containing 72 models, you’ll find huts (Shown above), a boat, many buildings (both intact and destroyed), walls, fences, towers and a mix of other props.

From Our Community

We’re always on the lookout for great examples from our community who are constantly pushing GameGuru to the limit with some unexpected treats.

The neat little example from user Gary Trickett showcases infinitely spawning character for those non-stop combats, click on the image to watch the action unfold. Pay special attention for the melee attacks later in the video!

For those of you who would like to know how all this was achieved, Lee Bamber made a twitch broadcast a month or so ago demonstrating this exact thing. Lee covers spawning at around 13 minutes into the video.

Well, that’s it for this week from the GameGuru coding caves. We’re working on fixes and tweaks all this week and hope to share a couple of builds with you in the next few weeks. So, for now it’s goodbye, enjoy your gaming and speak soon.

It’s been a long wait, but we’re now ready to release the all-important performance release of GameGuru. This last week has been spent working with our excellent beta testing team who have reported a number of issues of various importance that we’ve been able to fix quickly. We’ll be working up until the 11th hour to ensure a smooth, fast and stable release, so even now, less than 24 hours before launch we’re tied to our keyboards making certain we can give you all a great update. We’re taking this opportunity to expand on last week’s summary by bringing you a rundown of what you can expect in tomorrows release.

Before we go into greater detail, let’s take a quick look at some of the recent store uploads from a number of artists as well as another little teaser for our up and coming sci-fi pack.

It’s a bleak landscape on Mars as this screenshot proves. Of course, once we release the new DLC, we’re certain you’ll find a lot of other uses outside of sci-fi for this great media pack.

Dagored has returned once again with another amazing critter in the form of this excellent goat. Click on the above image to watch a video of the goat in action.

Rolfy returns with a much spookier character. Check out this great Wraith, complete with flowing cloak. Ideal for your fantasy and horror games.

GameGuru Update

As regular followers of these GameGuru news updates will be aware, we’ve taken the last few months to focus almost solely on performance, converting the existing engine from our DarkBasicPro language (internal development build) to a full C++ build. This has not only improved performance impressively but has opened the way for our next major update with our move to DirectX11 in the new year.

As well as the conversion, we have multithreaded parts of the engine, allowing a fully fledged live occlusion system which we’ve improved once again during the last week to give users an even better experience.

Overall, this significant round of performance work has yielded 100% increases for almost all of our beta testers, with many systems seeing even better results. A side effect of this work has been that we are able to better manage memory, allowing users to create much larger levels which the new engine can, of course, handle more efficiently.

On the subject of both performance and memory consumption, we’ve recently identified and squashed an issue causing large, multi-level games to run out of memory after a large number of launches. This vital fix now opens the door to some large linear games.

While performance was our main objective, we’ve also taken some time to look at some of the other concerns raised by our users, not least of these is our new and improved front end we discussed last week, making it much easier to access the help files, videos and demo games. In addition to all of this, you’ll be able to access the new GameGuru beginners guide in PDF form.

Here’s a little teaser of the small level that we build up in the getting started guide. We take users through every step required to make their very first game.

As well as this, we responded once again to the communities needs and have improved the editor experience. As well as additions to bring the F9 editor mode into line with the main editor screen by aligning many of the keyboard shortcuts across both modes, we’ve also added the all new Group Select Mode, which allows the quick selection, editing and deletion of large groups of entities.

We’re sure to expand on this feature in the months to come but are very happy with the improvements to the editing process.

Of course, we’ve also been able to improve a number of other areas, including improving the stability and reliability of media transfer to standalone, we’ve made improvements to default media content, adding LOD to a few models that lacked it and also updating some audio effects to take advantage of the 3D sound system.

As part of the development process and in response to user requests, we’ve also moved GameGuru from the Games section of Steam to Software. We agreed with a lot of you that this category is now more suited to the direction of GameGuru and lies well with our long-term plans as well as the needs of our community.

Well, it’s back to some last minute testing for us, but we’re pleased to say we’ve crushed, squashed, beaten and generally subdued all the bugs on our list and are confident that you’ll love this next update. As always, many thanks for your patience and we will aim to keep our future updates smaller in scope and more frequent.

Don’t forget, that if you’ve not voted or want to change your mind, the voting board is available for you to access 24/7. You can add your weight to the features you most want to see here.

Goodbye for now and we hope you enjoy the faster, leaner and all round improved GameGuru when we launch tomorrow.

Hello again and welcome to the GameGuru weekly news. Lots to report this week and so we’ve decided to dedicate this news update to a full progress report before we hit our planned public release next week.

We now have over 60 beta testers helping us to iron out some final issues as well as reporting back on their findings and feelings of the current beta build, so far there have been 31 beta builds and we plan to release one every day this week to ensure that you get a rock solid performance build. Of course, performance is a never ending story and we’ll always be looking for ways to improve and fine tune every facet of GameGuru to get the best out of each and every feature.

First off let’s take a look at some of the forthcoming DLC packs in the way of eye candy. We’re working hard on a new Sci-Fi DLC as well as preparing new content to add to the Fantasy pack and don’t forget that if you’ve already purchased the Fantasy DLC you’ll receive all future update to the pack for FREE! Here you can see some space entities for Sci-fi and weapons for the new characters in the fantasy pack;

Now let’s take a look back at all of the performance work that we’ve carried out so far:

As many of you’ll be aware, a few month ago we undertook the mammoth task of converting GameGuru from our own internal language to a full C++ engine, a move itself that yielded some great results in performance as well as laying the groundwork to allow us to move into the future. We were very impressed with this move alone, which sped up everything from loading times to game performance as well as having the hidden benefit of reducing the memory overhead of GameGuru allowing users to create much larger games to fit the new performance. Overall we saw jumps of between 5% and 30% from the conversion.

Of course, we knew we could do better and once the conversion was complete we started looking at new ways we could get the most out of the real time occluder (a system to hide objects that aren’t in view). As well as multi-threading the process, we spent a month tweaking the entire system, adding many little fixes to get the best results. The net result of this work has seen well over a 100% increase in performance on almost all systems and maps, with some combinations showing much greater improvements.

Additional work has sped up characters, improved the performance of animations and the audio system, sped up the grass renderer and shaders. We’ve also gained boosts from shadows and light rays as well as hundreds of little fixes all aimed at setting us on a performance road that will take us into the future.

We have also revisited a lot of the default media and made fixes and improvements to allow it to work more efficiently in the new, improved engine.

We’ve still got a lot that we’d like to do after the next public release, and in truth performance work has no end, as there’s always something that can be improved as technology moves forward but you must be asking by now what you can expect? Beta testers are reporting between 100% and a massive 900% improvement in performance in some circumstances and we’re sure that the future will result more of the same as we move forward.

While on the subject of performance, we’ve prepared this very useful video to help artists prepare new media as well as improve existing models for the new GameGuru.

Click on the link above to learn how to quickly add Level of Detail (LOD) to your new and old models, not only improving the quality of the media in GameGuru but also, if you’re a store artist, helping to improve your sales.

In addition to this, we’ve also provided a new FPE command to assist the artist in getting the best from their models within GameGuru. The new command notanoccluder=1 can be added to completely exclude some models from the occluder process. Designed for objects such as transparent windows, glass tubes, wire and mesh fences, etc, this setting allows objects that will never hide anything to be ignored by the occluder, preventing precious processing time spent calculating see through objects. We recommend that all store artists revisit their media if need be and make these adjustments. For those of you who need more information, you can check out this thread for some examples.

Of course, while performance has been our main focus, we’ve also listened to feedback from users and have taken the opportunity to add the much-requested lasso / group select to the Editor.

Users can now select a huge number of entities with a swipe of the mouse, allowing groups of objects to be moved, rotated, scaled or deleted, improving consistency and speeding up development time.

We also made improvements and several fixes to the media importer, making it far more stable across a range of media which we’re sure will be a welcome fix for a lot of users.

We’ve also listened to our newer users who expressed an interest in greater and easier access to tutorials, so we’ve put many of our demonstrations and guides into one simple menu as well as starting work on a getting started user guide that we see as an expanding, living document that will grow side by side with GameGuru.

That’s it for this week and thank you once again for your amazing patience and support. The long wait for the next build is drawing ever closer and we hope that you will enjoy the results of our labors as much as we’ve enjoyed them.

As always, keep an eye out for further snippets from Lee’s blog and of course, the weekly Twitches.

It’s Monday again and welcome to our weekly GameGuru news. We’re very pleased to announce that we’re moving into the final stages of development for our performance build and have recently begun expanding the beta testing team to ensure that a successful, fast and efficient build is delivered to our thousands of users. We are aware that it’s been in development for some time and we still have a couple of weeks to go before our full public release, but we’re sure you’ll be happy with the progress we’ve made in this monster update!

This week we’re taking a look at community developments, some of the latest store releases and catching up on the core GameGuru development progress.

This week let’s take a look at two games being developed in GameGuru that offer something a little different.

Snake by forum user smallg is a 3D take on the classic snake game. Click on the image above to see some game play, or click here to read the forum thread and download the game. smallg has used his LUA scripting skills to create a unique and different game.

In other community development news, Canyon Jumper Extreme is a fun little game created by forum user Mookai. This entertaining first person platform game really shows off the versatility of GameGuru and we’re always amazed how our talented users stretch the engine even at this early stage of development.

You can download the game from this thread as well as post your comments and let Mookai know what you think.

A quick look at the store

This screenshot, provided by the artist himself, demonstrates the pack in action. Click on the image above to watch a video of the media in action.

Also, recently uploaded to the store is a complete set of UK road signs from store Artist KenCharlesLong. This great value pack contains 21 road signs in various states of repair.

What’s new in GameGuru!

The last week has been all about bug fixing and more performance work, getting just that extra bit of speed from the rapidly improving engine.

We have also taken some time to convert a lot of the default media to use full LOD, bringing that extra fine tuning and optimisation to the entitybank. We’ll be publishing a video soon to show artists can prepare their assets to make use of the GameGuru LOD system.

As we mentioned above we’re now extending the beta testing to a wider group of users. We’ve locked down the feature set and are now ironing our any final issues. You can expect the release in a couple of weeks time from now.

After that, we’ll concentrate fully on the rest of the DirectX11 work, bringing the engine fully into the modern world. A lot of the groundwork has been completed and we expect the process of moving from prototype to core engine to be a smooth one.

Hello again, we welcome you once more to our weekly news roundup. Today we’ll be taking a long look at some of the great store media that’s been uploaded in the last few weeks as well as a look back at a few of the older but excellent packs and models.

First off this week we take a look at some of the new characters and critters that have recently been added.

Continuing on the fantasy theme is this fully animated golem pack from Gtox. The Golems can either fight unarmed or with an impressive stone club, towering over the player as they advance.

Also new from Gtox this week is this very worrying and well animated cobra. Click above to see in all it’s terrifying glory.

Returning to Dagored but sticking with snakes, this rattlesnake makes an ideal ‘hidden’ enemy as it slithers through the grass towards the unsuspecting player. Click on the image above to see it in action.

Of course, if you’re looking for a great skybox to go with your critters and monsters Rolfy has once again returned to the store with a number of excellent skyboxes. Night forest can be seen above.

Also from Rolfy this month is Haunted, another amazingly atmospheric skybox. A great addition to those haunted house games you’ve been planning for Halloween! :-O

Here’s a reminder of some great free items from Kasseyus in the form of these excellent giant mushrooms. You can download them all from his page.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this run though of just a small collection of the old and new from the GameGuru store. We’ve got more than 6,500 items on the store now, so don’t forget to stop by every day for new media and store deals.

What’s New in GameGuru?

It’s been a very productive week in GameGuru development land, with our focus moving away from performance and onto stability. We’ve already fixed a large number of issues that have been niggling our Beta users and we are pleased to see improved stability, ease of use and flexibility in many areas. We’ve also found time to add a couple of much-needed improvements to the editor which we’re sure you’ll enjoy (selecting more than one entity with a rubber band control)

All in all, we’re very happy with development progress, and we’re sure you’ll all be excited to hear that we are on schedule for the first major performance release in mid-November.

As, always, thank you for your amazing and continued support and we’ll see you all next week.

Hello and welcome to our new look GameGuru weekly news. We’ve a lot to go though and this week will be focusing more on what our excellent community is up to. Of course that doesn’t mean you won’t be getting all the latest development news, but we also hope to bring you an insight into the minds of your fellow developers as well as maybe a little more on the inner workings of GameGuru production.

Many of you will recall that Lee and Rick recently returned from Play Expo a couple of weeks ago and we were very pleased with the response GameGuru received, especially the feedback we received on it’s ease of use. We couldn’t have been happier than to see what may well be one of our youngest users delve into GameGuru.

Young Charlie can be seen here enjoying a game of Cartoon Antics and we’re sure is only a few weeks away from creating his own masterpiece.

We took advantage of this opportunity to ask one of the world’s future developers some questions;

Q: How did you first hear about GameGuru?

A: I saw it on Daddy’s PC.

Q: Why do you like GameGuru?

A: I like creating new worlds, like putting grass in, I like buying things from the shop with my birthday money.

Q: What sort of games do you make with GameGuru?

A: A city game and a door game. I want to make a racing car game.

Q: Are there any new features you’d like to see added to GameGuru?

A: Different types of water, tree branches and a leopard.

Q: Looking ahead in life, what’s your ambition?

A: To be a Mister making games.

We wish Charlie all the best and hope he enjoys the updates and new features to GameGuru as we release them.

We also has a great time speaking to some parents and one of the things that was universally agreed upon was the need to be able to leave their child in a safe development environment, while still allowing the same parents to create higher rated games. So, I’m sure all developers, especially those with young children with inquiring minds will be pleased to hear that we’re now planning a parental lock feature so that guns, blood and violence can be controlled. This will be in the DirectX11 version early next year.

While we’re on the subject of ease of use, we set ourselves a small internal challenge of creating a playable game in 60 seconds and although even we’ll admit the results were basic, we were very pleased with the small level Lee created in just 1 minute. We feel it really shows we’re on the right track and that as we move forward, balancing ease of use with powerful results will see GameGuru go from strength to strength.

Click on the image above to see how easy it is to make a simple level.

Of course, not all of our users make levels that quickly, in fact, it’s fair to say that the attention to detail by many of those developing with GameGuru is wonderful, very well thought out and shows a lot of promise.

First off is this excellent high-tech city scene from ShadowMan. Using a mix of media from Mega Pack 1 and Mega Pack 3 this screenshot really showcases what a little bit of work can achieve.

Our last look at community developments this week is this great, ongoing project called Mercenary from GameGuru user Smallg. He’s been known for his excellent scripting support for quite sometime but this is his first full project that we are aware of, and it’s looking great. You can read all about it here as well as watch other WIP videos.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this deeper look at our community, and of course if you’ve anything you’d like us to feature feel free to email Dave at davehawkins@thegamecreators.com. We can’t promise we’ll feature it, but even if it’s not newsletter ready, Dave will be happy to give you some pointers toward what you’ll need to do to make it a worthy showcase.

What’s new in GameGuru

We released our latest beta (Beta 11) to our beta testers and once again we’ve seen a significant performance improvement. We felt we’d gone as far as we could before our move to DirectX11, but never a man to give up, our lead performance coder Dave Milton has returned to the code for one last push at getting some extra speed from lower end machines. We’ll let you know how he gets on in next week’s news.

After this last performance boost, we’ll be moving onto bug fixing (and maybe adding a couple of small features) before returning once again to our beta testers and finally onto you, our very patient and understanding users.

That’s it for this week, we hope you like the newer, more focused look and we’ll see you all again next week.

Welcome to the GameGuru weekly news and what a week it’s been. Some great advancements on our performance work, as well as improved visual work and a more focused approach following feedback from our beta testers. You can of course read all about this a little later, but as usual, let’s take a look at what our community is up to first.

We’ve featured a lot of E30Legends fantasy work in the past, but this modern day London Undeground screenshot from the Steam Artwork gallery really caught our eye as a nice change of pace for this talented user.

Another exciting development this week is this great sci-fi pack being showcased by GameGuru artist and user Voodoo. Click on the image above to see the models in action. Even better news, is that Voodoo is releasing the pack for FREE on the GameGuru store in the next few days. Click here to view the forum thread and pass on your thanks.

Ok, that’s what’s new from the community, let’s take a look at what else is happening in GameGuru world.

Store News

The store continues to grow at an amazing rate, you can now find more than 6,100 items available, with the number increasing daily.

New from the excellent BSP is yet another high quality weapons pack. Modern Weapons pack 3. It contains five super high quality weapons ideal for all of your modern warfare games. You must check the pack out and view all the screen shots of the models.

The master of critters Dagored has returned with this great giant centipede, ideal for fantasy or post apocalyptic games, or just because it’s another must have critter. Click on the image above to watch this creepy crawly in action.

Lastly this week is a look at Pasquill’s excellent Vehicle pack, we’ve featured his work on this pack before, but you can now purchase all of his modern day vehicle models in one go at an amazing discount. The pack features five vehicle types with texture variations, totaling 25 different looking vehicles ideal for modern day genres (with a few rusty variations for those extra grungy games.).

Become a Store Artist!

The Game Creator Store connects creative artists and musicians with enthusiastic GameGuru game developers. Can you create game-ready 3D models or themed atmospheric music for the GameGuru community? If so, sign into the GameGuru website and sign up to become a store artist!

Play Expo

As many of you know the two leading lights of TGC (Lee Bamber and Rick Vanner) attended Play Expo in Manchester over the weekend. They both had a great time and came back with a lot of information and feedback from users old and new.

Lee explains and shows the finer points of GameGuru with TGC community visitors at the Expo.

We were also very impressed with how easily the younger users got to grips with GameGuru. Users as young as 9 years old were quickly making and playing their own levels.

All in all, the Expo was a great success for us and we would like to thank everyone for making Lee and Rick so welcome and we hope to be back next year to meet you all again.

Twitch News

The GameGuru Twitch Broadcasts continue and don’t forget that we broadcast every Wednesday at 4pm GMT/ 11am EST and 8am PST. Every week we answer your questions and share some tips and tricks on how to get the best out of GameGuru. We’ll also have up to the minute reports about GameGuru and maybe some insights into our plans for the future.

If you missed last week’s broadcast, you can catch up on it and all previous broadcasts by clicking on the image below.

GameGuru Development News

We’ve seen lots of great work internally with some good feedback for the majority of testers. Building on this success is a whole gambit of new performance tricks that we’re working on right now. As always we’re going to be a little cagey when trumpeting facts and figures until we’ve got some solid and consistent results, but our beta testers have tested a variety of maps and scenarios and are reporting between 10% and 200% increases with most of them seeing a doubling in performance across the board! We’ve recently completed our first multi-core occluder function and are tying this in with a clever batch exclude system which we’ll be testing out on our beta testers soon. We have some very high hopes for this and expect another big improvement for the entire testing team. The plan is to continue improving performance for the rest of October and then release the new version to everyone mid November. Following that work we’ll be swinging back to work on the DirectX11 engine which will make your games shine with lots of lovely new rendering techniques! You can expect the DirectX11 release around February time.

Signing Off

Once again we draw to a close, we hope you are happy to hear of our progress to date and we’ll keep you up to date with all of the facts and figures coming over the next few weeks leading up to release day.

As always thank you all for your patient support, you keep us going during this long but vital area of the development.

Don’t forget Lee’s regular blogs, and we’ll be back every Monday with more on GameGuru and our showcase of the best of the best from our excellent community.